Here to prove that Ai in the music industry doesn’t equate to the redundancy of human creativity, Ai Kittens gave us a view into the process of creating neural network music based on the discography databases of iconic artists. He’s rewired the sounds of everyone from RHCP to the Weeknd, and on November 18th, he’s unleashing his next album. Blink-182 fans might want to pay attention.
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Ai Kittens, welcome back to A&R Factory! We loved getting stuck into your album arranged from Rage Against the Machine’s music last year; plenty of other people have, judging by your streaming stats! Clearly, there is an appetite for tech-driven original reformations of iconic music; would you say this is the future of music?
Undoubtedly, such tools will be available to more and more creative people every year, including well-known artists. Probably even now such tools are used in creative camps, but we don’t know about it. Some attempts are made by guys from Bored Apes, but there it seems AI art is just a cover to sell to a label. With my works, I want to show that by using neural networks everyone can be a creator and producer.
I would also like to point out that neural networks are an endless source of inspiration for the artist, the only question is if you can make maximum use of it.
You prepared 260 songs, and only 15 made the cut for the album; do you think the LP format is outdated in the age of AI music?
In fact, in order to get 260 tracks, 3,600 tracks were generated, from which I made this sample.
In my opinion, listening behavior doesn’t change much, and of course, no one will listen to all 200 songs because that is almost 5 hours and 30 minutes of music with no repetition. This music will have some kind of development; for example, it is possible to make an album with lyrics for a real band and perform it all at concerts. Of course, my dream would be if Blink182 would use it. But I spent that summer and part of the fall in LA and couldn’t meet the guys in the band.
It changes the approach to how the album is made, and how the hit song is searched for because you can listen to it before you do something yourself. You just have to listen to it and conclude whether you like the track.
Can you run us through the process of authentically arranging music via AI and what tools you use to create music from artist databases?
I use the Open Ai Jukebox neural network. Unfortunately, the company stopped further development because they found more profitable solutions with images. A server with video cards and the right settings is enough to get results. For the generation, I used two genres and text; the genre gene is punk, the artist gene is Blink 182, and I used four texts to randomize the results. I have 1 million 200 thousand songs of different genres and artists.
As a result, I get, with some probability, tracks that sound like I overheard them at a band rehearsal and recorded them on a tape recorder. And then the musician just plays that recording back at a rate of about 5 songs a day. So it only took us two months to do all 260 tracks.
If I worked with a real band, I think getting that many demos in that amount of time would be fantastic.
All that remains is to write the lyrics and sing them. (Although I have a separate project called Ai Lyrics for that). With him, I’ve already written about 50 pop songs in the style of Bruno Mars and Weeknd. You should also try to generate some lyrics in the style of your favorite artists. It’s a lot of fun.
What made you choose the Blink 182 back catalogue to generate an album from?
Last year I saw a newsletter from Kobalt, a music publisher where artists of all different levels submit requests to find songs for themselves; there I saw a request from Blink182. They were looking for a song with a different intro than their regular songs.
I decided to generate those songs for them. After I got the first generations, I wrote to Kobalt music, but no one answered me further than the secretary. I went to their office in L.A., but they kicked me out of there like I was crazy. Then I tried to meet John Feldman to show them the song demos, but that too ended in failure.
Blink182 is a great love from my childhood. It’s music I listened to as a teenager. Why not make more music like this if the musicians don’t make it themselves? But while I was putting it all together, the band was already going on a stadium tour in 2023. And they even seem to be alive and showing some activity.
What would you say to the AI sceptics who believe that embracing AI will make human creativity redundant?
AI will not replace humans. It will always be only a support for humans in the search for inspiration, to reduce the creative routine. After all, a living person needs money, a machine does not.
What can we expect from Ai Kittens next?
Next Friday, the blink182 album will drop. I’m trying to publish music every Friday; I have so many songs to release. You have no idea how much I want to show you what I have for Bruno Mars and the Weeknd.
But it’s so hard to communicate with them. I can’t catch Anderson Paak in LA in the next 2 months, but I caught him in Bali last week. Hope he will listen to my neuro stuff and maybe it will be the basis for the next 5 platinum albums…
Listen to Ai Kittens on Spotify. Follow his innovative career on Instagram.
Interview by Amelia Vandergast
